A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Indonesia’s Sumatra Island, the third tremor to rattle the area since early yesterday, the Indonesian Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysical Agency said.
The agency recorded the shallow quake off the Mentawai Islands, off Sumatra’s west coast just before 10:30am and said it did not trigger a tsunami warning.
The agency had earlier recorded a magnitude of 6.4, but revised that to 6.1, an agency spokesperson said.
Photo: Reuters
Three consecutive earthquakes struck the area with increasing intensity since the early hours of yesterday, with a magnitude 5.2 tremor recorded before dawn, followed by a magnitude 5.4 quake less than an hour later.
The magnitude 6.1 earthquake was felt strongly for several seconds by residents in the Mentawai Islands, in the provincial capital of Padang, and in the surrounding mountainous area of Bukitinggi, the disaster agency said in a statement.
The agency said there were no reports of casualties, but there was minor damage to buildings on Siberut Island.
Separately, Novriadi, a local disaster official in the Mentawai Islands, said that residents in several villages had been evacuated to higher ground and a local church, school and health facility had been slightly damaged.
The disaster agency urged the public not to panic and warned of the potential for aftershocks.
Padang was struck by a magnitude 7.6 earthquake in 2009 that killed more than 1,100 people, injured many more and caused widespread destruction.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the